Interop 2009 Day 1: Vendors, Vendors And More Vendors

One of the main reasons I come to shows it is to get some face time with people I have spoken with on the phone and then catch up with new vendors not yet on my radar. Yesterday, I spent the day in a room meeting a stream of vendors. It was like speed dating, but more fun. There are definitely some interesting products coming out of large and small vendors alike.

Enterasys

I started my day with Enterasys. Enterasys is one of those companies that has some very forward thinking technology that no one knows about. Network Access Control? Enterasys was doing that in 2001. Port profiles? They were doing that in 2002. Location based access control? Done. Integrating with external products for port control and traffic management? They did that too. Need to move a host from one location and subnet to another but don't want to split a subnet across data centers? They can automate that. On a technology basis, Enterasys can go head-to head with the rest of the infrastructure vendors. Perhaps Siemens Enterprise Networking  will give them a leg up.

Splunk

Next up was Splunk, the log reporting guys. They had a neat demo creating visualization graphs of the traffic hitting the Interop network, but the real strength of Splunk is the ability to consume and process log messages from nearly any source and then search, sort and generate reports. It's not as magical as it seems, at times you have to build out parsing language to get at the meat of the data in a log message, but once that work is done, Splunk makes reporting a snap. One area that they have traditionally been lacking is log management--cataloging, archiving and restoring. I don't know what has changed in 4.0, but I plan on finding out today on the floor.Gigamon

Then came Gigamon which makes intelligent network taps. Gigamon's products are very focused on forwarding relevant traffic from the wire to one or more monitoring devices. The products use multiple methods to forward traffic including hardware filtering, dynamic load balancing and downspeeding at line rate. The latter two functions are useful in cases where the network you monitor is faster than the ability of your monitoring equipment can handle. For example, you can take a 10Gb pipe and load balance it across ten monitoring devices. The Gigamon product maintains flow integrity just like a layer 3 / 4 load balancer does. They are going to be doing some interesting things with remote monitoring and centralized management. If you have a seemingly intractable network monitoring problem, take a look at Gigamon.

StrataScale

StrataScale came in talking about their IronScale service which bridges the gap between traditional outsourced hosting and cloud computing. With IronScale, you can rapidly provision servers, storage and networking like you can with an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, but your servers are running on dedicated hardware selected from a menu of choices. Your server isn't sharing  server hardware with someone else. It's a good service for organizations that want rapid provisioning in a familiar environment. Some features of cloud computing are missing like automated provisioning and usage based pricing, but those are features the company is working on.

VidyoVidyo promises to bring HD telepresence to you regardless of the hardware in your offices and with remote users. It's a tall order, but one of their claims is that the model of having a central Media Control Unit (MCU) that coordinates converts video streams between end-points adds undue latency and processing to telepresence. Rather Vidyo uses a video router which is a central point that simply manages conference sessions but doesn't attempt to convert video from one resolution to another. It's an interesting concept and may work in cases where you can't put an HD conferencing system everywhere.

Avocent

Avocent is enhancing their datacenter and server management product line to make lights-out data center management better and more reliable. The company is enhancing their data center management and design software, Merge Point Infrastructure Explorer, with LANdesk server management and their KVMs to provide a complete management suite to monitor existing data centers and to model and prepare for data center changes. Targeted at installations with 500 or more racks, it's not for every organization but can be very helpful for organizations that have one or more large datacenters to operate.

Zenith InfoTech

Finally, Zenith InfoTech is aiming for the small to medium business that needs back-up and restore capabilities but doesn't have the staff and expertise to manage a system themselves. Using off the shelf products that they integrate into an appliance, they simplify the storage process that can be difficult to do on your own. The storage solution is sold direct, but more likely offered as part of a large IT package from an integrator. Most vendors want to target the Fortune 500 enterprise, but there's only 500 of them. The SMB is a much broader audience with and Zenith appears to be making enterprise grade storage available to them.